Jarrett McLaughlin
“Snap Out of It!”
April 21, 2024
Psalm 24: 1-2, 7-10
Prayer of Illumination:
The earth is yours, O God, and all that is within it – including us.
Speak to us now and remind us that we, too, are a part of creation’s fabric – not exalted above as those who might control it, but those deeply embedded in its connective web. Amen.
Scripture:
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it;
for he has founded it on the seas,
and established it on the rivers.
Lift up your heads, O gates!
and be lifted up, O ancient doors!
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is the King of glory?
The Lord, strong and mighty,
the Lord, mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O gates!
and be lifted up, O ancient doors!
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord of hosts,
he is the King of glory.
Sermon:
The earth is the Lord’s – Lift up your head for the king of glory and let him in. Perhaps one of the best ways to let him in is for us to go out.
My friend and colleague Rebecca Messman says that it’s virtually impossible to understand this Psalm inside – “it wants you to step outside,” she says, “…to bump along until there is no roof over your head…because your soul has been grating against the irritants indoors.”
Those “indoor irritants” might include
The steady drip of dread that oozes from our televisions and newsfeeds.
The way a laptop encourages a hunched-posture in our shoulders and in our spirits.
The absolute nose-dive into our phones that leaves our eyes begging to behold something that is more than 18 inches from our face – leaves, clouds, anything.
With all of these irritants hemming us in behind and before, Psalm 24 invites us to snap out of it.
Last Sunday, not more than an hour after I had decided to preach on this text for Earth Day, it came time to take my daughters to choir. At the last second, I decided to bring my dog Desmond along for a walk over at the Battle Creek nature trails. Beginning from the parking lot here, I popped in my ear buds and ran through the campus.
As I arrived at the trailhead, we blazed forward and I was several hundred yards in before it occurred to me – here I am in the woods on a beautiful spring day and I’m looking down at my feet while Dwight Yoakam yodels on in my ears. “I need to snap out of it!” I said to myself.
So I did – I took the ear buds out and…with the words of the 24th Psalm rattling around in my brain – I lifted up my head.
I heard the chirping of birds.
I took in the brilliant green of fresh spring leaves.
I reached out to touch them and marveled at how paper-thin they are, so different from the thick, gnarled things they become by Fall.
And it wasn’t just me – the dog was snapping out of it too. Whenever I take Desmond into the woods, rather than on some stretch of endless asphalt, he too lifts his head in a whole new way. It’s like something primal awakens in him and for that moment he is so much closer to his true nature – darting his gaze from tree to tree, taking in birds, bugs, and of course the squirrels – though I think he just wants to destroy them.
We both heard this rustling just off the trail and lifted our head in time to see the slither of a snake darting from a puddle of sunlight back into a leaf pile.
It’s amazing what happens when you unplug – if even for a moment – if even for that short trip around the Sourwood trail. Its amazing what happens when you lift up your head.
Not three days ago I was walking in the woods with one of my daughters when she announced “This kind of trail is my SECOND favorite kind?”
“Second favorite?” I asked.
“Yes – the trails with crumbled leaves and pine straw are my second favorite – my favorite kind of trail is when the mud is completely hardened and flat and maybe there’s a little bit of pine straw on top but not too much, so you don’t slip.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s very…..specific!”
She chirped along up the trail eager to make it to the rope swing that would be our ultimate destination.
Speaking of destinations, Psalm 24 was most likely a processional hymn – the kind of poem designed to make you stop what you’re doing and pay attention. It’s the Biblical version of that favorite teacher tool:
“One-Two-Three…” “EYES ON ME!”
Lift up your heads – whoever you are – lift up your head for the King of Glory comes.
The Hebrew word rendered as glory here is Kavod.
[11:00 – It’s a fun one to say – try that one with me: “Kavod”]
Christian author Rob Bell writes “[Kavod] is that which happens when the monotony is pierced, the boredom hijacked, the despair overpowered by your sense that something else is going on, just below the surface, something that’s bigger and wider and deeper and more powerful than anything you could begin to imagine.”
The book of Exodus is perhaps one of the pivotal writings of the Hebrew Bible and it ends with a description of God’s Kavod. After Moses painstakingly follows God’s blueprint for constructing a tabernacle and a tent to shelter it, a cloud descends upon the tent and it says that the glory of God – the Kavod – filled the Tabernacle.
By night this presence is described as pulsing with fire – perhaps a call back to the burning bush – maybe even further to the furnace of all creation. Whatever it looked like, it was impossible to ignore.
Kavod insists that you take notice.
Kavod demands that you lift up your head.
God has a number of unflattering things to say about humans in the pages of Scripture, but perhaps none are as dead-serious as when the Hebrews are called “a stiff-necked people.”
When you cannot, or will not, lift up your head – this is cause for alarm.
There’s something intrinsically wrong with a people unimpressed with God’s Kavod.
There’s nothing worse than a people who are incapable of feeling awe.
A stiff-neck is “the anatomy of resistance to God’s glory.”
All creation invites us to snap out of this stiff-necked posture – to lift up our heads and experience God’s Kavod.
So – when was the last time you experienced that glory?
When the hair on your arms and neck stood up before the sublime.
When breath caught in your throat and you can scarcely put words to what you are seeing.
“That is the anatomy of awe. We are wired by our creator to feel it and lift our heads toward it…to be cleansed…and blessed and [even] saved by it.”
Whenever Earth Day rolls around on the calendar, there is – rightly – a sense that we must do our part to save creation.
But the opposite is true as well – God desperately wants to save us through creation.
Caring for creation is crucial – but let us remember that creation is God’s cradle for us and a way that God seeks to save us from all those indoor irritants – the drip of dread and fear for the future.
Nobody captures this better than the poet Wendell Berry – so I’ll end with one of his more beloved poems:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and [I] am free.